How Caroline Wendelin grew to 400,000 followers

Caroline Wendelin grew up in a house with two painters in it. She also watched both of them stop. “I saw them give up on art and find more stable work,” she says, “so, for years, I was convinced it wasn’t going to be my path.”

She made sure of it: at eighteen she went into the fashion industry, which she didn’t like, and lived in Sydney, Milan, Paris, Barcelona and New York while studying child development. Then she tried working in schools. That wasn’t it either.

The whole time, art kept pulling. “I was constantly taking photos of everything, filming, drawing, writing or playing the piano. I felt happy when I was creating.” In 2020 she stopped resisting and went all in: oil paintings drawn from fairytales and fantasy books, and a camera pointed at the easel.

Then success set the same trap her parents walked into

It worked. Too well. “I had orders for original oil paintings all the time, so I didn’t have any time left to invest in creating prints.” Print buyers were queuing and she was turning them away, because every hour was already spoken for. This is the quiet way art careers end: not from failure, but from a workload that squeezes out the actual art. She had seen where that road goes.

“Every hour you save printing is an hour you can spend creating.”

— Caroline Wendelin

The turn

So she refused to run the factory. The printing, framing and worldwide shipping moved to theprintspace, under her own name, and she rebuilt the selling around print drops: a limited edition, a fixed window, then gone. A drop puts one artwork at the centre of attention, gives her audience a deadline to decide by, and — just as important — gives the marketing a box to live in. Tease, tell the story of the piece, close the window, back to painting.

The hours that came back went into the two things that compound: the paintings, and the films of them being made. This is the reel her audience loved most — her, painting, kids in the studio:

Watch on Instagram — @carowendelinart

400,000 followers later

Today @carowendelinart is 400,000 people strong, most of her print releases sell out, and everything a collector unwraps carries her name: her signature, her numbering, her certificate. The relationship her parents never got to have with an audience is entirely hers.

“I have sold out most of my print releases and I know I can trust them to print and ship at the highest quality.”

— Caroline Wendelin

Artwork and photography © Caroline Wendelin · @carowendelinart